


humans are weak but you aren't

by LostMyTail



Category: James Bond (Craig movies), Skyfall (2012) - Fandom
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Assassins & Hitmen, Betrayal, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Not Canon Compliant, POV Q, POV Third Person, Podfic Welcome, Secret Identity, Secret Intelligence Service | MI6, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-14
Updated: 2014-08-14
Packaged: 2018-02-13 04:38:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2137272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LostMyTail/pseuds/LostMyTail
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He has never taken an oath of loyalty to the Queen, to the PM, to God; only to M, in front of her bulldog.</p><p>He has never sworn  to work to the best of his ability to protect England and the United Kingdom; only that he would do his job.</p><p>He has never promised James that he wouldn't lie; only that he would get 007 home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	humans are weak but you aren't

The rabbit was born to run. He has been running all his life. Away from it, at first.  
  
He learned, however, how to run _towards_ \-- towards a different life, and then through it, pushing his mind and body in the most exhilarating way. He grew stronger, faster, and bolder. He ran, and ran, and didn't know how to stop.  
  
At twenty-three, he ran into a white, skinny cocaine dealer who wheezed his last breath beneath the rabbit's forearm and fog-darkened skies of Hamburg far above. It was supposed to be a simple trade, as honest as it goes in the business. As he explained to his then-employer after the fact, there were 'complications'.  
  
The list in his head that he compiled in barely two days of doing his reconnaissance -- killed at least fourteen people distributing the drug cut by himself with rat poison and collecting the extra income, mauled those who failed to pay, repeatedly raped his two younger siblings; beat a barmaid with a crowbar, puncturing her lungs and leaving her to choke without even calling 112, because she stood up for a pair of men leaving her bar while holding hands (and that, _that_ hits too close to home) -- was a complication he was nearly happy to have.  
   
The rabbit spent far more time than he should, staring at the body, _marvelling_ at how his own heart _stopped_.  
  
He dropped his employer after getting paid, in favour of moulding himself into someone else, someone more feared than a simple courier of whatever the aspiring and real crime lords wanted him to carry.  
  
Soon enough, his days were under dictum of undying glow of computer screens and rusty smell of blood. He filled his hours with treasured items and data passing his hands, counted minutes as the invisible empires falling under his keystrokes, measured fractions of seconds in targets falling with his bullets embedded in their bodies.

* * *

_On the farm, every Friday_  
_On the farm, it's rabbit pie day._  
_So, every Friday that ever comes along,_  
_I get up early and sing this little song._

  
There would always come a day when he would leave, no matter where he settled. She'd known from the start, too. Told him as much over tea, hot scones from a befriended baker, and the top-tier reports she was consulting with him at two in the morning in her house. It was a long time before he would become 'Q', but longer still since he had first sent her an offer of helping the government, for a fee.  
  
"When you'll run," M said after finishing her Darjeeling oolong, milk and one sugar, "you'd better run fast, rabbit. You're not meant for the pie, but they will try to get you."  
  
She was the first to understand that his running didn't equal being hunted.  
  
He underestimated the gratitude he could feel for that, and how loyal it would make him; to her, of course, not the country. What irked him at times was that M looked at him like a mother might look at a wayward son - not under her wings, but always on her mind.

* * *

Two years, five months, and eighteen days later, Silva strikes the Vauxhall Cross. M stands tall and with dry eyes when he comes ( _runs_ ) at her call. She issues his new orders, hands him a stupid clip-on ID denoting his new position, and sweetens her tea with two sugars.  
  
"Yes, ma'am," he says, instead of, "I am sorry for your loss, Liv."  
  
He's never known Major Boothroyd as an actual person. He's never known agent double-oh seven, either, beyond the files and the stories he hacked and social-engineered himself, and not a word from M. She never talked about what he didn't need to know.  
  
He finds that Bond is a blur of a wreck of a human broken three times too many. The agent quips with the slightest note of uncertainty few people can detect and hunts the Queen's enemies with less ardency than he fights his pain.  
  
The rabbit concludes that Bond is a hunter who doesn't think much of the youth, treating it like prey that is neither interesting nor a threat. That is why Bond trusts him a small measure, enough for 'Q' to do the job of a four-eyed technological magician, pulling white rodents out of fake-bottomed cylinders and killing doves in folding cages.  
  
(The public -- he has to let loose a small bitter laugh in the darkness of his office, falling asleep for his six hours of rest, because there's working his arse off and there's being stupid -- the public will see the magic, and raise an outcry over it, demand explanations, throw stones at the target right in front of them. The Circus will nod and smile and bow in servitude, all the while vanishing invisible knives from under the public's throats. The rabbit will sneer in the backstage because this isn't who he serves, but stay in place because there are too many eyes watching to make a run for it.  
  
He _detests_ the publicity.)

* * *

Tricksters take pride in their sleight of hand. Runners pride themselves in how far and fast they can go.  
  
Rabbits cannot be proud. It's not in their blood. He tells himself that it wasn't pride that made him trip and make a mistake with Silva; it was a lapse of judgement, a moment of weakness, an error of his ways.

He nurtures a hatred for himself for days after Skyfall. It's not about her death because he did his best to fix what he messed up, and he couldn't possibly stop a bullet from 500 kilometres away (he's not a real magician). What he feels guilty about is that he wanted to run _away_ , felt his muscles twitch to start, when they got word that M is dead.

* * *

He has everyone think that's all he's ever done, sneaked into databases, made things miles away explode by pressing a few keys, tinkered until a phone was a phone only in name; that he's never faced death like this, and that's where his dark eyes and pinched lips and rigid movements come from.  
  
They know neither that his heart _stopped_ nor that he spent the hours after his dismissal the next day ("Go home, eat something, shower, and sleep, Quartermaster. Come back tomorrow at 8am at the earliest. That's an order.") assimilating that feeling into his mind gallery, rows upon rows to _marvel_ at whenever he wants.

* * *

It starts with Bond bringing him tea from wherever he's sent to; more often than his equipment, or himself, in one piece. 'Q' begins to smirk and joke again, but doesn't notice what it means; the rabbit knows, but prefers not to think of it.

* * *

He shouldn't even be trying to mend Bond. It's not that the he isn't suited for it; he plays well, knows which buttons to press, and, after all, smoke and mirrors are what magicians -- glorified con-men playing nice, and he was tasked with the job of being one -- do best.  
  
He is weak for giving in to temptation. He has no business with an old hunter, lion or not, especially if he's the one providing him with new weapons, new teeth.  
  
He gives in and pushes those thoughts far down and away, aided by Bond's rough voice and searing touch; and soft kisses to the nape of his neck that carry no intent to kill, and quiet discussions over mugs of hot tea in the sharp morning light or cold computer glow. He knows the right thoughts will float right back up when he'll need to run.

* * *

There are things he cannot avoid, of course.  
  
The small, simple wings on the thin skin of his outer ankles become a drunken dare from university years, for which he cared too little to go through painful laser removal. The eight dots, grouped in fours, twenty centimetres under his left armpit -- two prints of a running rabbit -- turn into a harmless remainder of an experiment gone wrong; something with weak explosives and ink and shielding himself sideways instead of ducking.  
  
Bond swallows his lies like he does coffee, quickly enough not to question their taste not living up to Scotch and truth.  
  
Bond never knows that the wings are for Hermes, to keep him sharp and quick on his feet; and that the footprints are for the rabbit's foot to remind him that one needs to work for their luck and that death will be his finish line.

* * *

He wishes he worked harder.  
  
Then, he wouldn't have Bond yell at him half-drunk, voice overflowing with pain and accusing him of everything, from the latest failed mission ("Casualties: 11 civilians, 2 agents, 2 handlers. Mission objective: failed. Targeted objects and weapons (see above) not apprehended. Several bodies (see above) have not been recovered.") to Skyfall (two years, seven months, fifteen days) to Bond still being alive. 'Q' wouldn't be yelling back, letting his emotions take over and mention M in ways he's never done before ("orphans make the best recruits", but those who cut all ties and stitch the wounds on their own are both too valuable and too volatile to pass up on).  
  
Hours later, he wouldn't notice his hand holding the tea mug shaking like when he was called "faggot" and "sick" and "abomination" for the first time. (He was fifteen and chose the wrong person to talk to; even worse, a teacher at the school he was attending at that time. He ruined them a few weeks later, when he was already two boroughs away, filling their drive and browser history with child pornography, and sent the police an anonymous tip-off. What followed were long, unending months getting nauseous and retching whenever he saw a boy and caught his scent and thought, _he's beautiful_.)  
  
He wouldn't wonder why seeing Bond (" _James--!_ ") turn away and slam the door was like being shot off of a ship, and falling into the ice-cold water far down below. He wouldn't be brooding, waiting, moving from the kitchen to the living room to the bedroom to the kitchen as if everything was normal, when in all honesty he is drowning, he's bleeding from a shot chest and a million stinging cuts into the salty water, and it is taking all his strength away.  
  
He wouldn't make the kitchen a mess of sharp edges and blood if he worked harder and was luckier and wouldn't have fallen in love with the bastard.

* * *

Three weeks after this, limping and bruised and not at all fresh from a mission in Russia, Bond brings him a blend of Chinese sen-cha with orange, cinnamon, and liquorice. He drinks it after seating himself on their bed and picks on the scabs healing on his hands while watching over Bond's pill-induced sleep.  
  
Bond is still out when the dawn breaks. The rabbit slinks out of the room and dials Moneypenny's number, standing in the kitchen and hoping she will be as reliable as her position would imply.

* * *

_Run rabbit – run rabbit – Run! Run! Run!_  
_Run rabbit – run rabbit – Run! Run! Run!_

  
  
The evening he runs (three years, two months, and a day after Silva), he leaves a tin rabbit figurine at M's gravestone that doesn't say she's M, out of respect for the old times.  
  
R gets directives and an obvious promotion to 'Q' on a sealed drive she cracks in fourteen hours and forty-eight minutes, beating his estimate of fifteen, but just barely.  
  
Moneypenny gets a box of gourmet herb-and-olive cupcakes as a token of gratitude she could cash in sometime, on top of a formal letter of resignation for Mallory.  
  
Bond doesn't get anything.

* * *

The first thing he does is scrub himself raw until he's only a shell. He fills himself with cold, meticulous professionalism moulded from fury against the world as a whole and certain people in detail; plants the hunger for more and gives it plenty of nourishment to grow; piles his tricks behind every fake emotion he can display. He keeps his gallery of kills with its twisting corridors and kaleidoscopic colours, a little therapy corner. He doesn't know how 'home' feels anymore, but he thinks it could be close to this.  
  
He has hideouts, holes around the world; keeps them clean when not in use and builds up their defences. He cannot have people just happen to stumble in; neither those high on their drugs, nor those equipped with flash grenades and semi-automatics.  
  
He picks his assignments (hits, jobs, targets; the minutiae of vocabulary will never cease to amaze him) with, frankly, great fuss. They come in endless supply and all appear to be unblemished carrots, but there are no crops sown to grow this perfect. He knows many of them would turn into sticks after completion, as they did in the past when he was careless and mistakes were more common than good moves.  
  
He kisses death every day, once more, and falls in love all over again.

* * *

_Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!_  
_Goes the farmer's gun._  
_Run, rabbit, run, rabbit, run._

  
  
He is 2935 miles away and ages ago from starting his job as 'the Quartermaster' when Bond kills himself.  
  
The rabbit watches the hunter shoot himself in the head. It is minutes after the fact because he thought he could ignore the notification of Bond coming to his ( _'their'_ ) flat for a short while in favour of getting an Earl Grey. It's not as if the former agent ever did anything of importance in his ( _'their'_ ) flat nowadays.  
  
He watches, he reflects later, like a deer caught in the headlights.  
  
He watches several long seconds of blood spreading and soaking into the beige carpet dotted with shards of bone. Then, his tea is all over the wall and the floor, spreading and soaking into the red Turkmen carpet that glistens with pieces of glazed ceramic.

* * *

Eve sighs, ending with a small hum of relief he has known her to make, as she toes off her heels and turns on the lights in her flat. She takes three steps into the living room before he fells her with a kick to the knees. He hits her on the kidneys when she tries to turn, eliciting a groan, then continues his move in a smooth curve to remove the concealed carry from the small of her back and place it behind the band of his jeans. Then, he flips Moneypenny around so that she can see him over the steady barrel of his pistol.  
  
She gasps and her eyes widen, he notes, just a little.  
  
She should be trying to disarm him. Instead, she speaks, voice quick and clear.  
  
"God, Q, put the gun--"  
  
"I'm not 'Q'," he corrects. Eve flinches, perhaps at the cold in his voice. "You swore to me you would keep an eye on him. You promised you would take care of him for me."  
  
"Q, I did all I could, I swear--"  
  
Something's off, something he cannot put a finger on _is wrong_ , and he snaps, colouring his voice a vicious red.  
  
"You _promised!_ "  
  
The tell-tale sound of people rushing in with heavy gear rattles his composure and the staircases. He hits Eve in the solar plexus - she isn't reliable at all, bloody _traitor_ like all of them - and runs for the nearest window. It's not the one by the fire escape, but he can make do like he wouldn't without the door being kicked in somewhere behind him.  
  
Bond is dead, yet it his his voice that commands, "Stop right there."  
  
As if he heard a twig snap, the rabbit pauses at the open window, with goosebumps rising on his skin. He wishes they were caused by the wintry air getting through his commonplace clothes, but beneath them he is clad well enough, and the temperature never makes his scars prickle with anxiety like hearing a dead man does.  
  
He wouldn't have listened if not for that voice. Too late, he knows all the little things that were off all along.  
  
Tick, tock, tick. _Weak, weak, weak._  
  
Bond's voice gives the special forces three seconds. Ten assault rifles join Bond's Walther, aimed at the former Quartermaster, complete with orders to drop his weapon that are meant to be intimidating. They are experienced hunters, with the smell of gunpowder lodged in their skin, and ordinarily would consider such firepower an overkill for one person. They've been told some of what he's done over the years, however, and so no-one can blame them for being overzealous, afraid of being kicked and having their bones broken.  
  
Looking out this window, he can see two snipers settled in the buildings roughly opposite Moneypenny's block. Had he given the area a thorough recon rather than a quick sweep in his haste, he would have known about them.  
  
Three seconds ago he could have worked his foot out of the snare and disappeared. He would have ran fast enough.  
  
(He can do it now. He has more living shields and weapons than he has need for. Get the man to his left, the one who's the second-highest risk for him and therefore the second-last likely to be taken. Aim for the head below the helmet, eyes and lower. Lay low, below the window, take out the snipers, aim for arms and heads. Take out Moneypenny, just a leg will do; she can command the whole Britain from her desk already. Take out Bond. Kill Bond.)  
  
He shudders.  
  
Tick, tock. _One, two..._ He flicks the safety on and shows his hands, the gun hanging by the finger guard. He drops it with a disdainful cant of his index finger. It's kicked away without delay.  
  
"On your knees!"  
  
It isn't the voice of the dead man that would compel him to listen.  
  
_Five, six..._ He reaches back down with his left hand without rush, pulls out Moneypenny's pistol with two fingers, and lets it go as well; saves the spec-ops the trouble. He returns his hand to shoulder level.  
  
"On. Your. Knees!"  
  
_Eleven, twelve--_  
  
He's pushed down on his knees, a foot swiping his right ankle back to ensure he'll fall. The contact of joints bearing nearly all his weight and hardwood floor produces a dull thud that is buried beneath the shuffle of his arms being wrenched back and down and zip-tied at both wrists and elbows. The pat-down is cursory and efficient, his weapons and tools removed one by one until the soft, worn clothes are all that's left.  
  
(They'll only begin to divest him of his finer implements in the days and weeks to come, when they start to feel things breaking - or breaking their bones - under his skin that shouldn't be there; things that don't trip the metal detectors at airports and MI6's numerous doors.)  
  
He is grateful for the time they let him breathe the winter outside, twenty seconds to stop his mask from cracking like ceramic, to stop making mistakes; _to stop being weak._  
  
When he is hoisted back to his feet and turned to face Bond -- strapped into tactical gear, Walther still drawn -- his face is fine. The former agent's training fails for a moment, expression hot and cold and broken in quick succession before hardening in hatred.  
  
The rabbit briefly wonders whether M would be angry with him for breaking her orphan better than she did.  
  
He has walked straight into the snare they set for him, let them take him on gunpoint, and now he cannot run anymore.

* * *

_Run rabbit – run rabbit – Run! Run! Run!_  
_Don't give the farmer his fun! Fun! Fun!_  
_He'll get by_  
_Without his rabbit pie_  
_So run rabbit – run rabbit – Run! Run! Run!_

  
  
They don't offer him any carrots; not like they did when he played a bright little upstart with glasses, fitness score barely allowing admission, and a cup painted with 'Q'. Their carrots' worth was, of course, laughable compared to what he did on his own; he just couldn't have let on while playing the role. Their sticks aren't any better than the last time, either.  
  
He feels at home underground, where they keep him; just as he does in darkness, or surrounded by noise. The palette of drugs pumped into his system is brilliant in its simplicity, but not worth much against what he's been put through before, by people not caged with silly notions such as "the Prime Minister wants to object" and "he's a genius, a criminal, yes, but think about it". The water is unpleasant, it's always been, but they don't particularly put their hearts into it. These hunters, it appears, have souls of geese - they cannot break him.  
  
They help him scrub those hard-to-reach places inside him, the ones where _something_ was hiding, made him look and come back and hesitate and get caught.  
  
They work in his favour just as Bond's lack of experience with real feelings. The man handles them like pieces of smashed glass rather than steel rods they could become, incapable of using them precisely in a way that would hurt. In just a couple of months, he loses all of the pieces, and the only purpose of his visits is to show the rabbit the wounds in a futile attempt of drawing out guilt.  
  
There will come a time when the need to run again will be greater than the gnarled amusement and satisfaction he draws from both of their pain. He could slip the wire and run on most of the days with greater or smaller chance of success, but it's more interesting to watch the hunters turn more and more desperate to break him, less and less careful. Soon enough, their actions will amount to snipping the wire themselves. He paces himself with every hour of torture and every visit of Bond's, reins in the hormones coursing through his veins, calms the twitching muscles, and thinks _not yet._  
  
He's got time.  
  
The rabbit will slip out of the snare and tighten it around the hunters' necks until he'll smell their blood in the air, and then he'll run, run and laugh and not look back.

**Author's Note:**

> Lyric credits: 'Run Rabbit Run' by Noel Gay and Ralph Butler.  
> [Listen here.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXmk8dbFv_o)


End file.
